Deputy United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Wendy Chamberlin is due in east African and the Great lakes region next week with a delegation of top executives from five of the world's leading corporations.

The UNHCR said in a statement here on Friday that senior executives from Manpower, Nike, Merck, Microsoft and Pricewaterhouse Coopers will travel with Chamberlin on a five-day mission visiting refugee camps and the UN agency's projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi.

"The aim of next week's mission is to give business leaders an opportunity to learn more about UNHCR's work in East Africa and the Great Lakes (region), as well as to see for themselves the impact of their involvement on the daily life of refugees," the statement said.

The statement said the five corporations are part of UNHCR's Council of Business Leaders, set up last year in Davos to build additional bridges between the corporate and the humanitarian communities.

The role of the council is to advise UNHCR on the best strategies to capitalize on existing joint projects and to develop new and innovative public-private partnerships.

The council also aims to raise awareness of refugee issues in the business world, the statement said.

"As well as visiting refugee camps in Kenya and Tanzania, the delegation will follow a convoy bringing refugees from Tanzania back home to Burundi," the statement said.

There are more than 240,000 refugees in Kenya, the majority from Somalia and Sudan.

Tanzania is home to more than 400,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi.

In Burundi itself, UNHCR is running reintegration projects for some 300,000 people who have returned from exile -- most of them from Tanzania -- since 2002.

Next week's visit follows a week-long tour last week by heads of three of the largest UN humanitarian agencies who urged the world to match political progress in the Great Lakes region with a new commitment to end the suffering of the millions of people forgotten by the rest of the world.

James Morris, the executive director of the UN World Food Program, Ann M. Veneman, the executive director of UNICEF and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres took a six-day trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi and Rwanda on their first joint mission to their common operations last week.

Source: Xinhua